Mousie

Prism99, this is very relieving news. I went to that website and learned things I didn't know.
I've been using my last flash drive, (64 GB), for almost three years. You can imagine how many
patterns and pictures and family pictures, all kinds of things I have on that stick. I'm going to look
into some of the suggestions you made and start backing up before I'm devastated.
I had no idea that erase and "fixing" was somewhat detrimental to these devices. I change subject
titles and things all the time. Thank you for such valuable informationv .
Thank you to the person that started this thread too.

Sewnoma

I use an external hard drive that runs a backup nightly, and after the local fires, I'm buying a second one and am intending to rotate them out every six months, with the extra one being kept by my sister (about 100 miles away). The six months between drive swaps, I will also back up any new files to the cloud. Then when I swap the drives, I will clear my cloud storage and start fresh. (I have way too much data to keep it all on the cloud and am not willing to pay for additional storage.)

Odds of both of us losing our homes at the same time is pretty slim. But I might also put a third hard drive in a safe deposit box, I haven't decided yet.

I use Seagate external drives; I have a 4TB backup drive that cost less than $100. (Amazon carries them.) I like them because they're small, have a good reputation, and come with built-in backup software that is really easy to configure. Plus they come in a pretty blue that I like. LOL